Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

“There’s plenty I haven’t told you.”

“I doubt if I’d be interested.”

I went in, put my wet bathing things back into the bag, put on my hat and went out. He was sitting on the step. “Where are you going?”

“Well, there seems to be a town or something over there, so I thought I’d take the train back. I was supposed to be brought back long ago, but nothing seems to have been done about it.”

He threw my bag into a corner, took off my hat and sat me down in the canvas porch seat. Then we started arguing again, and were right back where we started.

We argued and argued, and it was dreary and didn’t make any sense, and he said of course he loved me, and I said he didn’t say it the right way. Then he said his vacation started the next day, and we could have a two-weeks’ honeymoon, and I said I didn’t see what that had to do with it. Then the frogs stopped croaking as though somebody had given them a signal, and it was so still you almost held your breath and everything we had been talking about seemed unreal, and all that mattered was that he was there and I was there, and peace came down upon us. And after awhile I said: “How much do you make?”

“...Hundred bucks a week.”

“All right, then, I make eighty-five. That’s enough.”

“Do you mean yes.”

“I might as well. I really want to. Do you?”

“You know I do.”

“Then yes.”

Next thing I knew, the sun was shining and I was lying there under a blanket, and he was shaking me. “Breakfast’s ready.”

I got up and went inside. He was all shaved and fresh-looking, but my sports dress was wrinkled, and my eyes were red and my face shiny, and my hair all rough and ratty. I took a bath, gave the dress a quick press with an electric iron that was there, and made myself look as decent as I could. Then we had the toast and coffee he had made, and when we got in the car the dew was still on the grass. We were before the big Monday rush, and made good time. We parked near Brooklyn Bridge and went over to the City Hall and got married. We were the first couple. We got in the car again and started uptown. I looked at him and realized I had never yet called him Grant, and yet he was my husband.

We drove up to the Hutton, and I went up and packed and then came down and checked out, and paid with a check. He put my things in the car, and we drove over to his apartment, which was on East 54th Street. It was in a regular apartment building and had a large living room with a view clear over to Queens, and dining room and kitchen, and seemed a great deal more expensive than anybody could afford who made only a hundred dollars a week. But that wasn’t what struck me about it. It was the strangest place I had ever been in, and yet I knew it was interesting and in very fine taste. Except for the furniture itself, which was comfortable and of good quality, everything in it, even the rugs, was Indian. There were Mexican serapes, all very beautiful, hanging on the walls, as well as pictures by Mexican artists, mainly, as I later found out, Rivera and Orozco, all of Indians. There were Navajo rugs scattered around, and Indian silver and gold work, and on the wall a framed collection of arrowheads, ranging in size from tiny little red ones, which had been used to shoot birds with, up to big spear heads, and all arranged beautifully, in order of size, in white cotton batting with a glass frame over them. Then off on a table, under glass, there was a collection of stone instruments, which I later found out were what the Aztec priests had used to hack out the hearts of the sacrificial victims. However, there was something very beautiful about them, made as they were out of a black stone called obsidian, which was capable of being sharpened, as Grant once showed me, merely by holding it in water so that the oxidation or something brought it to a fine edge.

All this, however, I only partly saw, except to realize I was in a most unusual place, and also to realize that there was something back of all this wild talk of Grant’s that I did not in the least understand. He had the boy take my things to the bedroom, and then began walking around much as he had the evening before. Suddenly it was dismal and hot, and sticky, and completely different from what a bride’s first day is supposed to be. However, I merely said: “It must be getting on toward eleven, so I think I had better go to work.”

He hardly seemed to hear me. “Ah — what was that?”

“I say it’s time for me to go to work.”

“Oh. I suppose so.”

“Well — shall I come back here then?”

“Why — yes, of course.”

“May I have a key?”

“Why — certainly. Here, take mine.”

I usually went to work on the subway, but I felt so miserable I took a taxi, first taking care to note the number of the apartment house, which made me feel still worse, as it was really supposed to be my home, and yet I had to remember it as though it was the address of some stranger. I cried in the taxi all right, and I was still crying when we came in sight of the restaurant. Then I saw it was being picketed, with a lot of the girls out there carrying placards, and arguing with people that started to go in. So I knew the strike had come as a result of the big meeting. But I was too sick at heart even to think about the union, or anything, and I told the driver to go on without stopping, and then I told him to turn around and take me back where he had picked me up.

He had to go down to the Battery to turn around, and then was when I heard newsboys screaming the name Harris and saw the big headlines. I bought a paper out of the cab window and there it was:

Underneath was a big picture of Grant, with the caption Heir to Railroad Millions, and a smaller picture of a girl named Muriel Van Hoogland, with a brief item in very big type saying their engagement was announced last June, the wedding to take place in September, but that when she flew in from California that morning, she found he had just two hours before married me. I began to see things a little more clearly, or thought I did. I looked to see if there was any more, but there wasn’t except for a small item about the Karb strike. It had started, apparently, only a few minutes before I drove up there. The demands adopted at the big meeting had been presented to the management, which refused even to consider them at all, whereupon the girls had been called out on strike.

By now, I realized that except for the coffee at the shack, I hadn’t had anything to eat, so instead of going at once to the apartment, I had the driver let me out at Times Square, and went in a restaurant for a sandwich. But while that was coming I went to the phone booth and called NBC and checked on the programs that had gone on ahead of Bergen on that station. And one of them was the young man who does interviews with people boarding planes at Lockheed Airport, in Burbank, California.

When I came out on the streets again there were later editions, with longer items in them. One was an interview with Muriel Van Hoogland, in which she said she didn’t care a bit, and then burst out crying and slammed the door in the reporters’ faces. One was about me and my work at Karb’s and in the headline of that occurred for the first time the nickname, Modern Cinderella, which stuck. So by now I was not only feeling miserable, but afraid and worried, and I wanted time to think. I didn’t feel glad I had married a rich man. That part hardly entered my head, important though I hold money to be. I merely felt in some bitter way that I had been made a fool of, and when I ate my sandwich I walked up to the Newsreel Theatre and went in and sat down. There was nothing about me on the screen that day. I suppose it was too soon, though there was plenty later. I don’t know how long I sat there, but finally it all seemed to focus that I had to have it out with Grant, and yet I even hated the idea of going back to the apartment. So after a long time I left the theatre, and it must have been three or four o’clock.